sunnyraini
Google
[We were on our honeymoon from the UK, we booked this property last minute for 10 days at full room price.]||||Pros (let's start with the good):||- beautiful property with gorgeous independent little rooms||- everything was new and well kept||- hot tub overlooking the mountains||- breakfast itself was delicious||||Cons:||- We arrived to a locked estate gate, we had no code to enter the gate and no way of calling the owners as there was no phone signal. We had to wait for 20 mins before luckily another guest arrived with the code (it had been text to her - but not to us)||- There are many dogs on site (around 6?), they are beautiful dogs but very invasive with your space. I like dogs but even I found them to be a bit overbearing, which made moving around the site more stressful than it should be - they follow you around and beg for food at breakfast. One morning, one of the dogs jumped up onto the breakfast table and ate a cake. The dog who lives outside of the locked gate always jumped on our car when we had to stop to put the code into the gate keypad - we were really worried he would scratch our rental car. He also jumped on us a lot and got our clothes dirty. This would be a terrible experience for anyone who is a bit wary of dogs and the owners did not warn us and did not take any action to keep the dogs away from guests.||- On our first night we were told that the owner would book us a table at the local restaurant - we just needed to confirm the time. We got settled in our room and then went to find them but they were not anywhere. We had no way (short of emailing them) of contacting them. The central kitchen building was locked with no information in the room about enquiries. This was the case throughout our stay - we could never find a way to get information from the owners.||- The location made it difficult to relax throughout the day - the location is remote and if you want to get food you have to travel by car to a nearby town as the property only serves breakfast. This means that relaxing by the pool was near impossible as you'd only have an hour or so before having to get dressed and go out somewhere for lunch. We didn't find it convenient to always travel by car to get food.||- As a result of the inconvenient location and poor service, we chose to leave the property after 4 days. We tried to find the owners multiple times to discuss in person but in the end we had to email them. We were told that we would have to pay a "20% government fee" on the remaining days of our booking. This worked out very expensive to us, but had to just accept it. They told us this rule only applies to bookings over 4 days - we wouldn't recommend booking this accommodation for more than 4 days anyway. If you decide to book this accommodation do not book for more than 3 days to avoid this potential fee (we would have not been well entertained if we had stayed longer than we had).||- General location also not convenient for travelling around the island - do not trust Google maps - it takes 2.5x the estimated journey time from this location due to being surrounded by twisty roads.||||Our biggest con:||- Payment - admittedly, the booking site says 'cash only'. We naively thought there is no way a high end expensive luxury property would demand cash only from international visitors. They did. It was the biggest stress to try and figure out how to pay a couple thousand euros in cash when you are travelling from overseas. Frankly, it is ridiculous that a property that charged us this much would expect this in cash - how can travellers carry that much cash!? It seems like a way for them to avoid credit card transaction charges or perhaps they were not interested in setting this up. It was truly unprofessional. In the end I had to PayPal them the money to a personal account which meant I had to pay overseas transaction charges, which again is shocking service.||||Overall, we felt like we were a guest at their home and paying an absolutely massive premium for the privilege. It did not feel like they were there to provide a service to their guests. The property is lovely but is no way worth the cost or hassle to stay there.
